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Just to note that in the, what, four or five days since I’ve added the ReCaptcha plugin here, I’ve received a total of seven spam comments. In a similar span of time before adding the ReCaptchas, I’d have had upwards of 1500 — almost all of them caught by Akismet, but nonetheless taking up bandwidth and brainspace. Thanks, bot-foilers!

In the hopes of getting things around here moving a bit, of breaking up the logjam in my head, and of figuring out what’s ahead of me as I move on to new projects in the second half of my sabbatical, I’ve taken the utterly unlike me step of signing up to participate in #reverb10. For the rest of this month, I’ll be responding to daily prompts aimed at reflecting on the year that’s ending, and projecting my thoughts for the one ahead.

Today’s the first day of the eleventh annual conference of the Association of Internet Research, and the sixth of which I’ve attended. It’s lovely catching up with some of the folks I often see at these conferences, but also great getting to meet and hang out with folks I only sort of know from online venues.

I’ve decided to try to blog the conference a bit; I miss the heady days of heavy-duty conference blogging, and thought I’d try to see if I can recapture some of that.

This is the first conference day I’ll be spending with just the iPad, though; I decided to leave the laptop in the hotel today to see how well I’d do with just the more portable device.

We’re only one session in, but it’s working well so far. With one exception: switching back and forth from PlainText (in which I’m taking notes) to Twitter and WordPress is mildly annoying. Come on already, iOS 4.1…

For the next few days, my “Five Years Ago” block at right will be filled with post-Katrina posts. After all these years with the blog, it still feels very odd to have such a record of past trauma, the detail of what was going through my head in those days when I desperately needed someone around me to understand how bad things were in New Orleans.

The power of this kind of record is part of what makes me agree with Paul Carr’s assessment: what I’ve gained in immediacy and community via Twitter, I’ve lost in preservation, longevity, even permanence.

It’s this kind of thing that has me torn between the precious little time I have for this kind of writing and the desire to keep those thoughts somewhere I might get back at them five years from now.

I’m way more pressed for time than I’d like right now, finishing up a bajillion details involved in moving myself and a subset of my stuff across the country for the next ten months, but I want to be sure to take a second to note the absolute awesomeness of Anthologize, the new WordPress 3.0 plugin developed by the One Week | One Tool workshop, sponsored by the NEH’s Office of Digital Humanities. The plugin is designed to take you from blog to book — or, even better, from many blogs to many kinds of book-like outputs. I’ve only just begun playing with it, but can easily imagine it become a key part of my Intro to Digital Media Studies class, and I can also see its utility in repurposing thematically-linked blog posts in more permanent, more “official” form.

Huge congratulations to the Anthologize team, and I look forward to watching — and participating in — the project’s further development.

My “five years ago today” feature reminds me that the aforementioned time has spanned since the uproar over Ivan Tribble’s infamous screed hit the Chron (now available at a new URL). There are certainly many more academic bloggers than there were in 2005, and there are even some whose blogs are taken seriously as the key venues in which they’re publishing their work. But I’m curious about the degree to which attitudes about blogs have changed — both whether they have, and why. Is it only the rise of social networking systems that privilege immediacy (c.f. Facebook, Twitter) that have lent the relative leisureliness of blogs a kind of seriousness? Is it that we’re using blogs differently, now that we’ve got other outlets for the top-of-the-head thoughts that used to land in venues like this one?

Just utterly tyrannized by the to do list. Once the grading and the thesis drafts are out of the way, there are classes to prepare for, a grant proposal to be written, and a 15-minute presentation to be carved out of a 40-page chapter. Plus a journal peer review, a dissertation report, and a tenure review. And then there’s that little book project of mine with the looming deadline.

All of which is to say that once some of the small urgent stuff gets out of my way, and I can pay attention to the bigger important stuff, I’ll hope to have thoughts worth writing about, not to mention a moment in which to write them.